Walk-in dreams

The artist Otfried Culmann has created a fantastic place in the Southern Palatinate using building rubble, flea market finds, as well as discarded and gifted items. His Traumgarten (garden of dreams) in Billigheim-Ingenheim is a walk-in work of art that leads you into surreal worlds.

Cool air flows into the courtyard as Otfried Culmann opens the door to the garden. He lures you into the greenery behind the door. More colours appear with every step you take. White, blue, rose-coloured blobs that pile up to form columns and balustrades, figures and faces. Visitors to the fantasy garden enter another world, enveloped by the splashing of numerous fountains. The entrance door seems to totally separate the garden from the outside world. Passing cars, construction site noise, roaring aeroplanes—none of this penetrates the protective dome of the sound of running water.

Mit dem Laden des Videos akzeptieren Sie die Datenschutzerklärung von YouTube.
Mehr erfahren

Video laden

YouTube immer entsperren

Many visitors then stop for a moment, reports Otfried. With mouths agape and wide-eyed. Because this sight is so unexpected here in tranquil Billigheim-Ingenheim, in the centre of the Southern Palatinate. And because it is impossible to guess from the outside what is hidden behind the former vicarage where Otfried lives. The garden only reveals itself once you have walked through the backyard and past the former barn, which leads back outside. But visitors also pause because their eyes simply don’t know what to look at first.

Otfried smiles and gives them time to take stock of where they are. He is wearing a straw hat, flip-flops and a jacket in shades of beige over a colourful boxed shirt. The garden is 700 square metres in size, but the abundance of fountains, towers, figures and arcades makes it seem even larger.

The structures appear random and chaotic at first glance, but then reveal symmetry reminiscent of the Renaissance. This is broken up again by the vast quantity of plates, shells, tiles and stones with which they are decorated. It reminds you of the playful architecture of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Niki de Saint-Phalle and Antoni Gaudí. With many surrealistic and imaginative motifs. “I’ve transformed my daydreams into structures here,” Otfried says, “in order to not carry them around with me all day.” And other people have something to enjoy strolling through his imagination. His wife Gabriele is responsible for the greenery in, around and on the structures. She has created further splashes of blossoming colour—and a great scent of rosemary, mint and thyme.

I’ve transformed my daydreams into structures here

Otfried laid the foundation stone for his garden of dreams in 2015. He creates the structures intuitively. It can take years for one to be finished. He has installed more than 900 plates in nine years. Otfried finds the materials for the decorations at rubble dumps and flea markets. “But sometimes there’s just a box left on my doorstep,” says the artist. Word has got round in the town that he has a use for them. The plates are now piling up in his storeroom. “I have come to only accept Meissen porcelain now,” he says and laughs. But other finds also get their place in his garden. Several hot-water bottles and milk churns hang in a tree. What’s more? Try to count the number of motorbike helmets hidden around the grounds.

Otfried has lived here since 1978—in the house where he was born in 1949. His father was a pastor in Billigheim and lived with his family in the large house in the centre of the village, opposite the Protestant church. “I’ve always had a flourishing imagination,” he says. As a child, he used to build castles—inventive structures that had little in common with ordinary castles of the knights of yore. However, he didn’t believe that he could make a living from art back then. He opted for a more “down-to-earth” path as a youngster and learnt commercial art at a vocational school in Kaiserslautern. He got to see the works of surrealists for the first time in an exhibition held at the Pfalzgalerie art museum, and he was immediately drawn to them. He went to Munich to the Academy of Fine Arts and studied painting in Mac Zimmermann’s class, a representative of German surrealism.

His studies opened up a whole new world for him. A residency took him to the Villa Massimo, a German cultural institution in Rome. He visited Salvador Dalí several times in Spain, met Edgar Jené in France, organised exhibitions and exhibited his own works in 100 solo and over 300 group exhibitions—and actually managed to make a living from art. At the end of the 1970s, he was drawn back home. “The Ministry of Culture in Mainz provided financial support for artists returning to the country at the time,” Otfried explains.

When he learnt that the old vicarage was empty and for sale following the merger of the parishes, he bought and renovated it. He began to organise a number of exhibitions in his new, former, home, including the art imaginär, a biennial for fantastic art that was held in the Herrenhof estate in Mußbach since 2007. When this collaboration ended in 2020, he moved the exhibition with works from his own collection to the ground floor of his home. In three rooms, visitors can enjoy works by important surrealists such as Max Ernst, Dalí, Edgar Jené, Fabrizio Clerici and Fabius von Gugel—and by Otfried Culmann himself, of course. It is kind of an introduction to what visitors may expect when they enter the garden.

There is also a model of a building amongst all the paintings, graphics and photographs. It looks almost as colourful as the structures in the fantasy garden. “This is the museum I want to build one day,” says Otfried. His big dream is building a museum for inventive and surreal art inside an artistic building, ideally located on the slopes of the Palatinate Forest. Otfried is certain that it would be a crowd-puller. “Minimalist, abstract art is the order of the day in the major art centres at the moment. But there is also the other side, the maximum art that stimulates the imagination and invites you to dream—and still touches people today as it has back then.” After all, this is what he witnesses almost every day with the people who visit his gallery and the garden; as well as the art gallery in the former barn. There are self-built automatons here, each dedicated to an artist or a scene from a well-known opera or novel. Spherical harp and glockenspiel sounds play in the background, as if from a music box.

At the very end of the visit, Otfried asks: “Would you like to see the cellar, too?” Of course! Off we go, down the wooden steps, into the cool, slightly musty-smelling vaulted room. Otfried disappears briefly. Suddenly, the lights come on and fairground music fills the room. His Panopticum Orchestrion is a kind of giant fairground organ with a magician and Count Dracula moving to the rhythm of the music. A statue of Cleopatra watches the spectacle with an impassive gaze from the opposite side. And lobster rests on the mobile heater next to the stairs. However, having spent a few hours in Otfried Culmann’s world, this comes as no surprise.

http://www.otfried-culmann.de/traumgarten

The Traumgarten is open from 1 pm to 6 pm every Sunday in July and August. Admission costs six euros. However, Otfried Culmann also opens the door to the vicarage for groups of four or more at other times. Book a time slot by calling +49 6349 5250 or writing an e-mail to otfried.culmann@t-online.de.